


Five Salty Bitters

by NorroenDyrd



Series: Lighting Up His World [1]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, Drinking to Cope, F/M, Falling In Love, Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 07:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13383492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: Julian drinks to forget.





	Five Salty Bitters

Poured for him into a stout, square-sided glass by a sympathetic barkeep - soon to turn into a gigantic dark blob floating in the flaring orange river that is the brightly lit tavern - the sloshing liquid has an absolutely atrocious taste. Like some slithering creature (an extra-sized leech) slithered down his throat, stinging angrily all the way, and then relieved itself.

 

Disgusting.

 

Beyond disgusting.

 

He has already had five.

 

Five Salty Bitters… What an appropriate name; Pasha would love it; ‘My brother sure has plenty of both, don’t you, you oaf?’. An appropriate amount, too.

 

Five. Five shots of rancid liquid to wash it all away.

 

One to forget her voice, melodious like her very name, soft and quiet. She never raised it even when she faced him down during their first meeting - an intruder in her shop that she was not afraid to fight off with anything she had, her bushy hair standing on end round her brown, freckled face, its ends weaving through the air like gossamer, crackling with a tiny charge of magic (she ended up telekinetically swiping an alchemy bottle off a shelf and whacking him on the head with it, drawing blood like her master had once done… with the same result).

 

One to forget her smile, a white flash like a defensive spell, always ready to be cast, flaring brighter and brighter as everything else around her went dark and cold; reaching the peak of radiance as she held in her hands a pulsing, ethereally blue blossom, with potent poison coursing through its soft petals, calapble of tainting everything around it - the way he himself does. She tucked it into her hair, and tossed her head up, almost taunting him with how much good faith she had in fate - in him - and the sight of her smile spreading into a teasing grin made him weak in the knees.

 

One to forget her touch - a breathtaking proximity, as they pressed against one another in a darkened street corner, waiting for the guard patrol to march by, which sharpened his hunger for intimacy to an acute, searing edge… And also, a warm, comforting presence by his side, keeping him grounded, not letting the inky-black pool of weariness and pain from the curious case of vampire eel bite close round his head and suck him in. A sweet - dizzyingly so - temptation that almost lulled him into selfishly wondering if he might perhaps… one day… earn the luxury of not waking up in the morning completely alone?

 

One to forget her eyes, bright and full of fire that glittered like the burst of tiny firework with every new misadventure he dragged her into, from a rushed dive into a walled-off abandoned garden to throw the guards off their trail, to a spur-of-the-moment, um, contribution to the local community theatre. That fire faded away, at a heartbreaking speed, as he drew back from her at the docks, his stomach taut with ache, his lips numb with muttering that his was the path to be walked alone.

 

This makes four Salty Bitters in all to forget her. The last… The last one is to forget himself.


End file.
